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I'm going to set down some scattered thoughts on a subject that has preoccupied me for a week or so: how do we sing the Lord's song in the face of the graphic, violent acts of murder in our society?

This question has come to me from colleagues both this past week (as the country witnessed the real-time murders of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five policemen in Dallas) and last month (after the mass shooting in Orlando).

The United States is no stranger to mass shootings, and clergy and church musicians naturally turn their attention to the question of an appropriate liturgical response.

An obvious answer is prayer. As Christians we are called to pray all the time. I think Christians find themselves praying as they learn of violent events and in the days and weeks that follow. Surely collecting this desire to pray around these events in the Prayers of the People is a good thing.

And I don't want to put words in the mouths of the clergy, but the sermon is also a possibility. Though not a requirement, I don't think. I do know Karl Barth is said to have drawn attention to the intersection of the Bible and the newspaper, and this certainly holds great homiletic potential. But this isn't really my area, so I have to leave it to the professionals.

But then what about the music?

Well, maybe after a mass shooting we could change a hymn to something meaningful. Like "Amazing Grace". That would be nice.

According to one definition not a week would go by without us needing to sing that hymn. And our call as church musicians is not to annoy people with the same hymn.

Or maybe we could find a few other options, but is having a "tragedy" hymn list really necessary?

Please don't get me wrong. I am not insensitive to the very real problem and pain of violence. And liturgical responses in the streets and cities where these events happen are absolutely necessary. But I think we must be rather more thoughtful about the intersection of our weekly Sunday worship and the CNN Breaking News banner.

A story about this: several years ago I had finished the Thursday night choir rehearsal for the Third Sunday of Advent ("Gaudete Sunday"). This particular Sunday comes at the midpoint of the Advent season and is typically marked by joy (Gaudete is Latin for "rejoice"). The music chosen for the day certainly relied on this. But the next morning 20 elementary school children were dead at wrong end of a gun. Other than the Virginia Tech shooting, this was the most deadly mass shooting in the United States. This was awful, even 400+ miles away.

And still, the music was chosen, the services were set. I remember that I made a remarks to the choir on Sunday morning before rehearsing the music again. I said something to the effect that "yes, we are all deeply troubled by the news this week, and, yes, this music is all quite joyful in tone, I know, but here's the thing -- this Advent waiting that we're engaged in, we know the result of this, and the result of this is the coming of Jesus, our Redeemer, who wipes away all tears. So, no, even in light of this kind of news, we're not going to be any less joyful in our Salvation. And this kind of joy doesn't make our grief at what happened unchristian."

As it turned out, there were extensive remarks and prayer planned for the beginning of the service toward the young children of the parish, including the reading of the names of the dead. And while I can't comment on the act's appropriateness, I do not think that it quite extinguished the liturgical ethos of the day. The pink candle was lit, the Word was preached, the Bread was broken and shared.

I've turned to an essay by James Alison called "Worship in a Violent World" which I think has something to say about all of this.

The true worship of the true God is in the first instance the pattern of lives lived over time, lives which are inhabited stories of leaving the world of principalities and powers, and gradually, over time, giving witness to the true God in the midst of the world by living as if death were not, and thus in a way which is unmoved by death and all the cultural forces which lead to death and depend on death.

As I do this church music thing a bit more, and as these violent events occur more and more frequently, I find that I have less interest in trying to reinvent the hymnody or the choral music to "fit the bill". I am beginning to believe that the Church's best response to events like these is to be the Church–in a way which is unmoved by death!

There are those who seek an alarmingly high degree of specificity in their church music in response to violent events.

One hymn writer promptly provided lines in response to last week's news. The first stanza reads:

When people die by hatred, when people die by fear,
When people die defending our right to protest here,
When young black men are murdered, when heroes die in blue,
When people die for justice, O God, we cry to you.

http://www.carolynshymns.com/when_people_die_by_hatred.html

But I wonder if James Alison doesn't point out the problem with this kind of creativity:

He writes of liturgy being "an ordered and relaxed way of habitually making ourselves present…to the one who is just there"

[worship] is an orchestrated detox of our mimetic fascination with each other which is the only way we are going to be able to glimpse the other Other who is just there, and who has been inviting us, all along, to his party.

If we bring in images of our mimetic fascination into our hymn singing wholesale, does this not work at cross purposes with our being able to "glimpse" God, the forgiving victim? The hymn above might be just the thing for a prayer or memorial service in Dallas, but is it appropriate at a Sunday gathering of a faith community in Detroit? I wonder if it isn't better to speak to it without needing to speak about it? The old English teacher's "show, don't tell".

Again, I am not advocating that church musicians adopt the familiar posture of the ostrich and bury their heads in the sands of complacency, but I think that the same kinds of questions we raise for our church generally should be asked of "current event" music, even if the timetable is hours instead of weeks.

I was grateful this past week for the gifts given in two twentieth-century hymns that I had chosen weeks earlier: "Where cross the crowded ways of life" (to give credit where credit is due, this is listed among the "tragedy" hymn list from Ponder Anew) and "When Christ was lifted from the earth." And the gifts of a shared lectionary and shared hymnal meant that these lines were sung by many in the Episcopal Church this past Sunday.

O Master, from the mountain side,
make haste to heal these hearts of pain;
among these restless throngs abide,
O tread the city's streets again;

–Frank Mason North

Reading "restless throngs" I could not help but see the images of the Dallas protest scattering in the streets when the first shots were fired.

Where generation, class or race
divide us to our shame,
[God] sees not labels but a face,
a person and a name.

–Brian Wren

And what more can be said about this stanza but that it may as well be the anthem of Black Lives Matter?

Finally, I think Rowan Williams and James Alison have both written elsewhere on the meaninglessness of violence. It is truly demonic in that it has no meaning.

Meanwhile, the dying and rising of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is rich with meaning, and it is this that we must place at the center of our liturgy and music.

If I may quote the words of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry

…there’s a side of me that says we’ve got work to do…I really do believe that Jesus Christ changes lives. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be here… Change of heart is very much what I think Jesus was getting at when he said to Nicodemus, “You must be born again to see the kingdom.”

So the more I lament, the more I’m ready to go preach and go live and go help the church be the church and do our work.

Curry: ‘Jesus doesn’t allow us the option of self-righteousness’ Episcopal News Service. 11 July 2016.

I'm ready to help the church be the church too, through our song, for the sake of the world.

Labels: Black Lives Matter, Brian Wren, church music, Frank Mason North, Gaudete, Hymn 603/4, Hymn 609, hymns, James Allison, racism, violence

There is nothing more beautiful than the musical heritage of the church on "Laetare" Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent. It is also known as "Refreshment" Sunday, coming as it does half-way through Lent. It is also, according to the Episcopal Musicians' Handbook known as "Mid-Lent", but I've never seen this name used outside of that handy spiral-bound reference.

But I want to focus on that initial name, "Laetare". Like it's counterpart in Advent, "Gaudete" Sunday, "Laetare" (Lay-TAH-ray) takes its name from the proper Introit chant of the day, "Laetare Jerusalem".

The Sundays "Gaudete" and "Laetare" both come just past the halfway point in their respective "purple" seasons. Both words mean rejoice. And the liturgical color for both days (if you can manage it) is pink, the liturgical color of joy.

Color tangent: Most churches, if they see any pink at all, only see it in Advent when the third candle on the wreath is pink. There is yet no mechanism to deploy a pink cue to the masses in Lent, but perhaps a type of Lenten wreath could be devised? Thorns would have to be involved. And we could use six or seven candles to lead us in to Holy Week? And perhaps it could take the shape of the Tenebrae hearse. No, this is a bad idea.

But enough with the semantics. On to the music.

At the parish where I serve, we have instituted the tradition of singing the Introit text itself to the traditional plainsong, though we sing it in English as adapted by Bruce Ford in The American Gradual [link to large PDF].

The words of the Introit come from Isaiah 66:10-11. Jerusalem is to be loved, praised. She is a woman. She provides nourishing milk. (In the parallelism in 66:11, omitted in the Introit, we get "that you may drink deeply with delight from her glorious bosom".) We are to rejoice, be glad, and "sing out in exultation".

It doesn't sound much like Lent so far, which is why this is such a wonderful tradition to keep.

The only thing that smacks of Lent here is the quick "all you who mourn for her" . But it's an interesting imperative that precedes: rejoice with her.

Even in our penitential season, we can be joyful.

Even though we have stripped out our "Alleluias" from the liturgy we can still have joy. Remember: we have only done this so they will perhaps sparkle a bit more at the Easter Vigil. Our Orthodox brothers and sisters actually say Alleluia more in Lent, a joyful approach. "Laetare" can give us Westerners a sense of this joy.

The Psalm verse here from 122 is also worth noting. It's not often in Lent that we hear "I was glad when they said to me * let us go to the house of the Lord".

Psalm 23 makes it's first appearance of the year on this day. It will quickly resurface on "Good Shepherd" Sunday (another great Sunday nickname!) in Eastertide. This beloved psalm of the church is worth singing twice, and we gladly receive this tradition of the church. To my ear, the word shepherd rings more prominently in Lent. It is, in this context, a psalm of guidance, of pilgrimage. We are refreshed at the stream even as we journey onward.

Church musicians can't get enough of this psalm, it seems. I suspect that I'm not the only one who also tends to put down a version of this at the Offertory. This year, the neo-pastoral setting by Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) fit the bill.

The final bit of refreshment on this day comes in the form of the hymn "Jerusalem the golden", a beautiful hymn by Bernard of Cluny. It well-known to the tune EWING, and this is how it is printed in the Hymnal 1982.

Closing the service with this hymn bookends everything nicely. Here, as at the introit, we get images of nourishment "Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest...".

The hymn tune helps make the midpoint of the third phrase of every stanza stand out nicely.

joys
daylight
have conquered in the fight
to that dear land of rest

That particular pairing of text and tune always makes me tear up a bit in the final stanza.

One of the reasons I'm so particularly fond of this hymn is that my introduction to it at Christ Church, Indianapolis, was accompanied by great festivity.

The men of the parish adopted the tradition of "Mothering Sunday" and prepared a rather lavish breakfast for everyone to enjoy between services. It was refreshment indeed, and all sang EWING with that much more vigor, having enjoyed such splendid milk and honey beforehand.

Whatever our traditions on this day, they come from the Church, our Mother. We are encouraged and refreshed in the midst of Lent.

Two final thoughts about two innovations:

A further innovation this year at the parish where I serve, the opening hymn was "Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness". We should not squander any opportunity for joy on this day.

A further innovation for next year: I think the choir should sell Simnel Cake and sherry at coffee hour.

Labels: Advent, Bernard of Cluny, Christ Church Cathedral (Indianapolis), food and drink, Gaudete, hymns, Laetare, Lent